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We invite you to join us at the Third Pearl River Delta English Studies Graduate Student Conference (PRD). This annual academic event aims to bring together junior scholars, graduate students established researchers from universities in the Pearl River Delta region (including South China, Hong Kong, and Macau) and beyond to generate ideas, cross disciplinary boundaries, and disseminate research.

Call for Papers

We welcome junior scholars and graduate students in linguistics (including descriptive and applied), language teacher education, translation, literature, and cross-cultural communications. Through the conference, we would like to consolidate the basis for cooperation in teaching and research among researchers and post-graduate students in English Studies, which has been established in previous conferences. The conference this year will consist of (A) Keynote Speeches (B) Plenary Presentations with Invited Speakers (C) Parallel Paper Sessions (D) Symposium (a collection of papers on related topics) (E) Workshops (F) Poster Sessions

Themes of Paper proposals The conference welcomes papers on all aspects of English studies including the followings: Linguistics (descriptive and applied) Language teacher education Translation Literature studies Cross-cultural communications

Submission of Proposals Please send a 150-200 word abstract for a 30-minute paper (20 minutes presentation and 10 minute for discussion). Proposals for symposium (4- 6 presentations in an two-hour slot) are welcome while ideas for workshops and alternative forms of presentation will also be considered. You may submit your proposals as email attachments (in Microsoft Word 2003 format) to: hkprdied.edu.hk

Grammaticalization is perhaps the most well researched process of language change. It is a process that involves the change of a word with lexical meaning to one with functional meaning, often phonologically reduced to the point of being an affix. One of the most well-studied properties of grammaticalization is that of unidirectionality or irreversibility: only content words can become functional, not vice versa. This property, apart from being puzzling in its own right, has also affected the way we think of language change in general, like a process with an endpoint, a specific goal that languages strive to achieve.

In recent years and more specifically after Lightfoot's seminal 1979 work, and the 'birth' of generative historical linguistics, more and more phenomena that are not related to grammaticalization have been investigated from a historical perspective (word order change, change in complementation patterns among others). Moreover, there have been some very interesting proposals that try to define the core properties of language change. Even more recently, language change has emerged as a serious challenger of one of the fundamental concepts of the Minimalist Programme, the strong minimalist thesis (SMT, Chomsky 1993) whereby language is an optimal system at any given time of its history. The obvious question with that is: if language is perfect at any time, how does change originate from within the system of the language? Finally, a central concept in generative linguistics is that of competing grammars that originates from optionality. Optionality, which is a crucially problematic concept for Minimalism, is particularly pronounced in multi-dialectal environments, like Northern Ireland. Competing grammars rely on dialectal variability and can further induce language change.

This workshop aims at discussing topics of language change beyond grammaticalization, and papers are invited on any topic relevant to this; we plan on having two sections with specific focus: one will be on 'Language change in relation to dialectal syntax.' For this we encourage papers that deal with dialects from a historical perspective or from the competition of forms in language change. A further section will be on the role of bilingualism and second language acquisition on change, where new research on second language use in the revival of Irish and other minority languages is beginning to contribute new perspectives on the influence of second language acquisition on language change. We invite abstracts for 30 minute presentations. Each abstract should be a maximum two A4 pages (including examples and references), font size 12. Send an anonymous abstract by email to c.sevdaliulster.ac.uk, with the subject labelled as: 'LSG workshop' and the details of the author (including name, email, affiliation and title of abstract) in the body of the email.

Important Dates: Deadline for submission of abstracts: 26 January 2009 Notification of acceptance: 2 March 2009 Date of the workshop: 24-25 April 2009